Chris Amico: Journalist

ACTON — The interim principal of Vasquez High School, Sharon Millen, said she has resigned following a scuffle prompted by a parent’s attempt to seize records of his son’s suspension.

Millen, interviewed Thursday evening, said she is pressing charges in the May 4 incident, in which she said the parent shoved her and slammed her against a wall. She said a restraining order has also been filed.

“I am pressing it to the full extent of the law, for all the school’s benefit,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

PALO ALTO — Three weeks after a brutal attack by fellow U.S. soldiers, Spc. Eric Huff is learning to walk again.

Shortly after midnight on Dec. 10, three soldiers from the 305th Quartermasters Company attacked Huff outside his barracks at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, South Korea.

According to a preliminary report by the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, the three soldiers knocked Huff to the ground, then punched, kicked and stomped on his face and head, leaving him with a fractured skull.

The next thing Huff remembers is waking up in the base hospital, his parents at his bedside. Huff had been scheduled to leave South Korea on Dec. 10 after a two-year tour of duty.

Only a week ago, Huff could only take a few steps on his own. He did not leave his mother’s Lancaster home without a wheelchair. Now, he walks independently through the halls of a Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto. Read the rest of this entry »

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Army Spc. Eric Huff remembers a knock on his barracks door just after midnight on Dec. 10, the day he was scheduled to leave South Korea after a nearly two-year tour of duty.

Two other American soldiers stood outside. He walked out and shut the door behind him.

Then came a blow from behind, on the head, and Huff went down. His three assailants punched, kicked and stomped on Huff’s face and head, leaving him with a fractured skull.

The next thing Huff remembers is waking up in the base hospital two days later. His parents, who live in the Antelope Valley, were at his bedside. Read the rest of this entry »

AGUA DULCE — County officials brokered a shaky truce Tuesday afternoon between the manager of a trailer park and residents who, until a few days ago, drove through the park to get to their homes on Briggs Road.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department began receiving calls about a makeshift roadblock behind the Oasis trailer park and campground on Friday.

Rick Helton, a Briggs Road resident, was one of the first to encounter the hastily erected roadblock. On Tuesday, the barrier took the form of a dirt berm and a wrecked car.

“I came home Friday and everything was locked up. I couldn’t get home,” he said Tuesday, standing just outside the boundary of Oasis with other disgruntled residents. “My wife and children are in Canyon Country right now because we can’t get to our home.” Read the rest of this entry »

Luma Ateyah loves America, so much so that when the Army rolled through her hometown in Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks last year, she made a flag to wave as they passed.

But Ateyah is not from the United States. She is an Iraqi from Baghdad, and the flag she waved had 51 stars.

“I tried to welcome the troops in my own way,” she says. “I wanted Iraq to join the United States, you see.” Read the rest of this entry »

The plaque reads: From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrown Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.

When I first told people that I was going to Belgrade, I expected the most common response to be, “Why?”

Why are you going to a country we fought a war with less than five years ago? Why do you want to see a city your country’s Air Force bombed while you were in high school? Why do you so desperately want to see hollowed-out buildings and the ruins of a Chinese embassy that was “accidentally” destroyed? Why on earth are you going to Belgrade?

I was over-generous in my expectations.

The most common question was, “Belgrade. Where is that again?”

We have forgotten another war. A decade of genocidal conflict has disappeared from American memory. While all eyes are focused on Iraq, we have forgotten another war from just five years ago. We have forgotten Yugoslavia. Read the rest of this entry »